Make me smile and think we come back in an things click and boom, dead bosses and loot!

Looking back at the beginning of T11 versus T12, the entry point was a lot tougher on raids imo. 349 versus 359+. I believe skill > gear but gear allows for a greater margin of error and enhances skill.

Also many healers had to adjust to no longer being able to spam their bread and butter spells. (PW:S, Druidy stuff, Chain Heal, Holy Light/FoL)

Thirdly, lets face it, WoTLK raids were a little more forgiving on a mistake made. Oh wait you hit an opposite color orb in the Twin Valkyrs, oh wait you wont die. Oh wait you didn’t move from a slime from Toxictron – dead….

At this point Firelands > BWD, BoT, ToT4W

Shannox – It is much more then a normal tank and spank fight. Sure you tank Shannox, but one had to use his mechanics to kill him and drop your tanks debuffs. Plus killing huntards is fun, but seeing him drop the same crap over and over again is quite annoying.

Beth’ tilac – Overall, this fight is kinda zzzzz. Where it stands out from other fights in this tier and tier 11 is you have to trust your topside team. You see their health bars drop and you cannot do a thing about it. Other then that the bottom team – its a normal control the summoned add fight. p2 is a tank and spank….zzzzzz.

Lord Rhyolith – aka the big fat jerk (hmm, kinda like Kerick :P) – the fight is different as to you have to guide him to active volcanos to reduce his armor while fighting off waves of adds. BTW HATE THIS FIGHT.

Alysrazor – as much as I complain about this fight, this fight has a lot going for it. I admit it, I love execution style fights, where you have to perform to win. The flying idea is nifty, the dodging of tornadoes is win as well.

Baleroc – I like healing fights…./epeen.

Majordomo Staghelm – I admit I am kind of disappointed with this fight. We learned it very quickly and tweaked and killed him. I was expecting more of a fight from the boss right before ragnaros. Although, his shapechanging to the raids config is quite unique and interesting. Different mechanics to deal with.

Ragnaros – OMG, fun so far! Dmg everywhere, add to kill or die! /swoon!
Another execute or die fight! YAY!!!! (yes, I am a bit of a sadist :P)

But more importantly…..4.3 APPEARENCE TAB!!!! Time to dress up and step out on the town!!!! This is the one way for Blizz to get me to go back to old content….older tier sets here I go! (Man i wish i did not d/e my T9 and T10 sets…sigh, or some of the weapons)

I like fights with distinct phases that require a switch in play or execution. On the Rag fight its going to be critical to assign duties on the adds for the transition phases, each person is going to have a job and we have to trust that everyone else is doing theirs.

We’ll need stuns on the two closest adds and let the tanks get them, we’ll need high burst DPS to get the next closest with big hits and then move on at 50% and let less burst damage get them. its going to be interesting setting it up and getting execution down. To bad it requires 2 minutes of ho hum DPS in phase 1 to ge there.

One thing I’d be interested in is your thoughts on these fights, dps versus healing. Since you see both sides in two different raids. Firelands feels to me like a raid where you have to have good communication. BWD/BOT weren’t quite so much. You could execute the mechanics perfectly without really thinking about what the rest of the raid was doings. In Firelands it’s not like that.